


After All The Dreaming, I Come Home.

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Wonderland AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-30
Updated: 2012-08-30
Packaged: 2017-11-13 05:22:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha gets lost in a world far from her own and when she comes back, she's not the same person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After All The Dreaming, I Come Home.

They find her after months of scouring the Earth. She's different though. Strange and quiet. No one is sure what to make of it. She doesn't sleep, she barely eats, and she doesn't talk to anyone. She stays in her room and no matter who talks to her or how much they coax her, she responds to them as little as possible.

The day she finally speaks, it's in a small, quiet voice and no one is expecting it.

"I want to go home."

~

She talks a little more after that. She says hello when appropriate and sometimes when it's not. She mutters to herself and she babbles in her sleep about strange places that can't possibly exist.

"I can't tell you where I was," she tries to explain once. "It's... there aren't words for it. It was just there. Beautiful and strange and wrong and broken. It was like nowhere I'd ever been."

~

She opens her eyes for another first time. Every day it's like this; she wakes up hoping for something different, for a world she's no longer in.

The sun rises in the morning here, and the world isn't topsy-turvy, upside-down and all around like it is back...

Back where she should be.

~

"Natasha."

Her name echoes in her head like it's something foreign, like it's something she's never heard before. It doesn't seem right even though she knows it is.

"Natasha, look at me." He sounds so desperate, so pleading. It makes her smile. Not in a cruel way; it's just nice to think that someone cares so much about her.

She opens her eyes, studying the man before her, and looks for a trace of something familiar.

~

She knows the names of the people in the tower and what she used to do. She knows about the life she led before she disappeared.

She remembers other things too, strange things, things that don't match up. She has too many memories of learning how to shoot a gun, how to speak English. She has too much and it's overwhelming sometimes.

More than sometimes, really.

She sleeps more than she really should.

She can shoot a gun and she can drive a car. She can fight and she can dance and she can do so much more. But she can't remember how to be the person she was before.

Clint looks at her with longing when he thinks she doesn't notice, but she sees. She knows he misses the woman she used to be.

Sometimes she wonders if she's supposed to miss her too.

~

She finds the name for where she was in a book.

It has pictures, and the world they show is strange and twisted. You fall down a hole and find all manner of peculiar things there. There are riddles and rhymes and the world is everything that it's not, there.

She smiles to herself upon closing the book and happily tracks down Clint to tell him.

"Wonderland," she says with bright eyes. "It's Wonderland."

What she doesn't understand is why he looks so disturbed after she says it.


End file.
